Vaugelas, as we have seen, did not finally elaborate his work till some twenty years after Malherbe’s death, and Balzac, though a correspondent of the Norman poet, outlived him by more than a quarter of a century. [Sidenote: _Ogier and the Preface to_ Tyr et Sidon.] But in the very year (1628) of that death appeared a document on the other side, and taking that side in flank at the point where it was, with the majority, to be most victorious. This was the _Preface_ of François Ogier to the second edition of the _Tyr et Sidon_ of Daniel d’Anchères, or rather (for this is a mere anagram) Jean de Schélandre.[313] The play is almost the only worthy representative, in French, of that English-Spanish drama which set the Unities at defiance;[314] the Preface, written twenty years after the first appearance of the play, but seven before the author’s death, is a brief but extraordinarily remarkable vindication, in principle, of Schélandre’s practice. Until M. Asselineau, in 1854, published an article on the subject, and the _Bibliothèque Elzévirienne_, two years later, included both play and preface in the eighth volume of the invaluable _Ancien Théâtre Français_, both were practically unknown. Even then notice of them was for a long time confined to literary historians; and of late an attempt has been made to put the _Preface_ aside as the mere freak of a student, in opposition to the taste of the time and the necessities of the stage. That the general course of literature in France followed for a time the line which Ogier argued against, and to which Schélandre ran counter, is perfectly true. But this is quite indifferent (except as a matter to be registered) to history, which knows perfectly well that Athanasius and his world are always changing places and principles. Moreover, it is quite a mistake to think that Ogier writes merely from the study, and with no consideration of the stage. Like Cinthio, like Patrizzi, like Castelvetro himself, he is no mere study-theorist. On the contrary he carries the war into the enemy’s camp with a refreshing audacity and no small force. It is the _classical_ arrangement, he says, which _offense le judicieux spectateur_, with its improbable and unnatural coincidences and tallyings. How, he asks, in a passage interesting to compare with Sidney’s satirical description of the opposite style, do the identifying rings, the shepherd-fosterers, the good old nurses, always turn up _comme par art de magie_ exactly at the right moment? How is it that Creon, and the old attendant of Laius, and the Corinthian who picked Œdipus up, all rendezvous at Athens in the nick of time? Is verisimilitude observed even in the _Agamemnon_? Is there anything dramatic at all—anything more than sheer narration—in the _Persæ_? Can the extreme defenders of the Unity of Time work out the _Antigone_ on their lines? or the _Heautontimoroumenos_? Then he proceeds to account (not at all badly) for the practice of the ancients, and then to revert